Meanwhile, the BBC is educating us:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38406491Trillions of high-flying migratory insects cross over UK"For the first time scientists have been able to track the hordes of high-flying insects that pass across the skies of Southern England every year. Unseen and unnoticed by humans, researchers found that 3.5 trillion bugs and butterflies annually migrate across the region. The researchers say their mass is equivalent to 20,000 flying reindeer."Santa is real. (And BBC News and Sky News will doubtless be tracking the reindeer overhead again this Saturday night.)

President Donald Trump has clarified the role of Religious Right favorite son Jerry Falwell Jr. in his administration: leading a task force on higher education.

More specifically, Falwell will lead the effort to deregulate a Department of Education that, under President Barack Obama, tried to rein in sketchy practices of for-profit colleges. Falwell’s goals sound like a perfect fit for Trump, who in November agreed to pay $25 million to settle lawsuits brought by students who claimed they were defrauded by his for-profit Trump University.

Falwell has said he was offered but declined the position of Trump’s Secretary of Education. That offer since has been extended to Betsy DeVos, who wants to privatize public education through school voucher schemes.

WASHINGTON — The Senate confirmed Betsy DeVos on Tuesday as education secretary, approving the embattled nominee only with the help of a historic tiebreaking vote from Vice President Mike Pence.

The 51-to-50 vote elevates Ms. DeVos — a wealthy donor from Michigan who has devoted much of her life to expanding educational choice through charter schools and vouchers, but has limited experience with the public school system — to be steward of the nation’s schools.

Two Republicans voted against Ms. DeVos’s confirmation, a sign that some members of President Trump’s party are willing to go against him, possibly foreshadowing difficulty on some of the president’s more contentious legislative priorities.

a_haworthroberts wrote:Back from hospital. And back online after being offline (at home) for around five days.

http://www.piltdownsuperman.com/search? ... -results=7http://crev.info/2016/11/lyell-loses-in-a-landslide/Oh now I see. Because a landslide is destructive and might hide evidence pointing to events of the unseen past, landslides destroy (ie cancel the existence of) all the evidence of millions of years of time and geological uniformitarianism (punctuated by occasional local/regional catastrophes). Of COURSE. (So all those blown up tower blocks you sometimes see on the news being demolished must have been built in just a few weeks then ...)

I suggest that these people have NO interest in understanding the past. Lest the knowledge of it might threaten their particular Bible-strapped fundamentalist Christian faith.

PS And the same YEC blogger is flagging this simplistic one minute of attempted indoctrination on his facebook:https://www.facebook.com/Piltdown.Superman/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14C4X7B ... e=youtu.be (comments disabled, well I never)If you prefer science and actual facts regarding Neanderthals, try this:http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/ ... ly-thought (I typed those words "Recent genetic research shows that modern humans and Neandertals interbred, suggesting that Neandertals and people living today should be classified as the same species" and this factual article came up - even though it does NOT say what CMI are saying in their YouTube propaganda. The video also misuses quoted words of biologist Svante Paabo, who was one of those involved in the study published in 2016 along with Sergi Castellano.)This is the paper flagged in the ScienceMag article:http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v5 ... 16544.htmlAbstract:"It has been shown that Neanderthals contributed genetically to modern humans outside Africa 47,000–65,000 years ago. Here we analyse the genomes of a Neanderthal and a Denisovan from the Altai Mountains in Siberia together with the sequences of chromosome 21 of two Neanderthals from Spain and Croatia. We find that a population that diverged early from other modern humans in Africa contributed genetically to the ancestors of Neanderthals from the Altai Mountains roughly 100,000 years ago. By contrast, we do not detect such a genetic contribution in the Denisovan or the two European Neanderthals. We conclude that in addition to later interbreeding events, the ancestors of Neanderthals from the Altai Mountains and early modern humans met and interbred, possibly in the Near East, many thousands of years earlier than previously thought."

This IS consistent with what Paabo apparently stated:"Many would say that a species is a group of organisms that can produce fertile offspring with each other and cannot do so with members of other groups. From that perspective we had shown that Neandertals and modern humans were the same species."It is NOT consistent with the video statement: "Neanderthals were humans, not ape-men." (The findings do NOT show that our species and neanderthals - and denisovans - are 'not' descended from creatures more similar than we are to great apes.)

Like I said above, YECs have NO interest at all in understanding. Their task in life is to produce propaganda that attacks and undermines unbiased scientists and their evidence-based conclusions. Their faith depends upon scientists being 'wrong' apparently.

And CMI are here (as also flagged by Sorensen recently) TWISTING the Bible ie LYING (of necessity) and calling 'Noah's Flood a 'massive extinction event'. What garbage. Which undermines what the Bible says God would do - see Genesis 6:19-20. (The Bible suggests that every land-based creature/species/kind would SURVIVE the judgment because of the ark yet the CMI liars are suggesting otherwise - since the context is the real FOREVER species-level extinction that science, not scripture, has uncovered via the fossil record.):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQZGzPA ... e=youtu.be

Sorensen will either name-call me over this post, or quote-mine me, or simply ignore the post. He will NOT engage with the actual content of the post. Rest assured of that.

Reality is SO troubling if you are a hardline 'biblical' young earth creationist.

[This post is now final.]

"Sorensen will either name-call me over this post, or quote-mine me, or simply ignore the post. He will NOT engage with the actual content of the post. Rest assured of that."Told you so:http://www.piltdownsuperman.com/2017/02 ... ggery.html"... this tinhorn wants to save scientists from themselves and protect the false narrative...".So here again is the truth that this lying blogger is REFUSING to engage with. Svante Paabo apparently stated: "Many would say that a species is a group of organisms that can produce fertile offspring with each other and cannot do so with members of other groups. From that perspective we had shown that Neandertals and modern humans were the same species." That is NOT consistent with the CMI propaganda video statement: "Neanderthals were humans, not ape-men." Scientists have not discovered that our species and neanderthals - and denisovans - are 'not' descended from creatures more similar than we are to the great apes.

And - unlike you - I have never used 'skulduggery' either here or elsewhere. Mere truth debunks young earth creationist claims. No skulduggery has ever been necessary (sadly some have done that but it is simply not necessary).

Sorensen is an evil hate-filled bigot who is lying his head off again - because I tell the truth about him and his nonsense. (Check the context - he's falsely accusing me re my comments of 11 December whilst actually discussing - in his actual blog text of 13 Feb - not that YouTube 1 minute drivel that was posted by CMI but instead some other stuff about neanderthals posted by the ICR. It's the usual hypocritical nonsense and reflex mudslinging from this fascist YEC propaganda merchant wearing 'Christian' clothing but behaving as a liar atheist would.)